How to care for your peasant

A great deal of information is available on the Internet on the subject of donkey care, but my Rubí Tuesday blog today is about the less well-known topic of caring for your peasant.

Our particular peasant was recently sacked from his part-time teaching job, so he is now a full-time peasant and spends more time on the donkey field. This has meant we had to give more attention to peasant welfare and think about the ways in which we can ensure we have a happy and healthy peasant who will be a faithful companion for years to come.

Companionship is important for peasants: here our peasant joins other peasants from the province at a gathering in Alicante.

The following handy peasant-care and welfare tips may be useful for those of you who keep a peasant or would simply like to explore this as a new subject for coffee mornings or after-dinner conversation.

Peasant care and welfare tips

Always make sure your peasant has plenty of space on the field to do all his sweeping up. It is very important for a full-time peasant to get daily exercise, going around with a rake, shovel and broom to sweep up donkey manure. Do not poo in one place but spread your ordure over a wide area. This means your peasant must expend more energy going around sweeping it up. Also this takes more time, so he does not become bored and morose.

A peasant in an entirely unsuitable space.

A peasant kept in a confined space will become obese and irritable. This may eventually lead to psychological problems and tunnelling behaviours. The Peasant Sanctuary recommends a space no smaller than 50 x 50 metres.

Peasants should be given a simple diet of home-grown fruit and vegetables and cheap beer. As long as the peasant is kept busy growing his beans and lemons, he will have less time to organise visits from the vet and the farrier who come to annoy us. The beer should be of the cheapest kind available, so as not to compete with the monthly cost of food deliveries for donkeys.
Remember: unlike us donkeys, your peasant hates drinking water.

You may find your peasant will sometimes respond well to being sent into the village to drink beer with his drinking companion. This only works if you send your peasant at the right time: after he has delivered your evening feed. Otherwise delays might ensue.

A happy peasant with his drinking companion Carl who is not happy because Rafa is serving in the Loteria booth and the beer is delayed.

On this subject, it is worth pointing out that bar tapas are a useful source of nourishment for your peasant, but only the free tapas that come with beer, otherwise this may add significantly to your monthly peasant food costs.

Do not chew your peasant’s gloves. It is always tempting to pick up the things your peasant leaves behind on the field and chew them (broom handles, wellington boots, phones, etc.) But this can result in your peasant becoming stressed and using bad language.
“You little bastard Morris: you’ve done it again!”

How do you stop your peasant organising visits from vets and farriers? This is a perennial question for donkeys. The best solution is to create an enormous fuss whenever they arrive. Run around the field and refuse to be caught. When you are caught, break the ropes, kick the visitor and refuse to have your hooves picked up.This results in great difficulties for the peasant in organising future appointments.

I hope you have found these peasant care tips useful and if you have any further questions we would be happy to answer them. We would also like to give thanks to the folks at the Peasant Sanctuary and its Spanish house, El Refugio del Paisano whose peasant behavioural expert, and part-time Assistant Principal at a failing secondary school, Pablo Pedalo has been a great help to us in putting these brief notes together.

15 thoughts on “How to care for your peasant”

On the Peasant Sanctuary website it says that making sure that your Peasant eats regular homegrown olives will be good for his overall wellbeing, particularly when had with a glass of red wine. Ensuring that he eats them in good quantities means that there are plenty of olive stones to go round for a donkey snack before dinner.

Dearest Rubí, I am disappointed in your otherwise finely magnificent blog post today only in my frustration to see that you still provide us with no good peasant-kicking tips.

Where should we aim ? That would be a good starter.

I do understand that your current peasant has already been kicked about in various ways, and that you might feel some reluctance in helping us get in some extra kicks, after all that might hinder your food supply, but that should not prevent some purely thinky exercise ?

Its David. I was wondering if I could have your private email so I could send you some interesting things I have found. I wasnt sure what other way to contact you as I have lost the private email you gave me and had no other way of contacting. I suppose you no longer have your Elians email address…

Hi David, I was hoping you’d get in touch. A good thing they didn’t fire me before you got your A-grade last year, eh? (They had no respect for the GCSE students this year, who were already messed about by the merging of Year 10 and 11 last year.) I’ll send you my email address.

Maybe we need a more thinkmunch blogg about how to care for your Separatist lunatic keen on feeding only his own donks but not all donks everywhere !!

I must say, I don’t like the sound of this Quit Morer bloke — sounds quite like your awful old ex-next-door neighbours and their barky dogs, loud disco music, silly guns, thinking all donks they don’t like should be thrown out, and silly big statements to compensate for their silly little separatist sausages.

Hi Jabba. Yes the Spanish press and TV are full of the news about Quim Torra, a xenophobe and latest nazi-catalan-seperatist to be proposed as “president” of the Govern. I don’t know as I want to return to the subject of Catalan politics on this blog; at least not just yet! Conscious of the fact that I have not even blogged much about donks in the past weeks, I shall be putting up a new blog shortly.

I am not just fighting for my right to a just settlement after my illegal sacking; I am also fighting for my right to proper union support. The CC.OO union – having accepted my union dues quite happily these past few years, with a quarterly direct debit of forty-plus Euros from my bank account – now seems quite keen to promote a very poor out-of-court settlement to avoid the risk of paying court costs if the judgment goes against me. I am not impressed. This has taken all my energy for these past weeks. It reminds me of the time I had to fight to get the NUT to take my case seriously when I wanted their support in 2010 to sort out the CRB chaos. You remember that? I’ll get there in the end, but like the 2010 business, when I received just four hundred pounds compensation from the CRB, I don’t hold out much hope for real justice in this case.

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Finestrat town hall: Matilde and the mirror donkey

Matilde let out a bray of surprise when she saw her reflection in the mirrored window of Finestrat town hall. Click on the image to go to a sound file of donkeys braying in turn in a market. There is a great selection of different braying sounds.

Finestrat Weather from AEMET

El Parral is not a donkey sanctuary

I bought two donkeys in 2010 and both turned out to be pregnant. I couldn’t risk the foals going somewhere they might not be treated well, so I kept them and ended up with four adults!

It was easy supporting them when I was working full-time but I am now retired on a very small pension. Food, regular vet and farrier fees, plus annual Ministry of Agriculture admin costs all add up. Any donations would be gratefully accepted. This is not a registered charity but simply a very low budget private keeper trying to give four donks a good life.